


Blood in the Bond

by SylvanWitch



Series: Proving the Exception [2]
Category: The Avengers (2012)
Genre: M/M, Soul Bond
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-03
Updated: 2013-04-03
Packaged: 2017-12-07 09:33:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,339
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/746983
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SylvanWitch/pseuds/SylvanWitch
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Phil researches the First Bond.  Clint researches Phil.  Set in the storyverse established by <i>Won't Happen Again</i>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Blood in the Bond

**Author's Note:**

> Some of the lovely readers of _Won't Happen Again_ had questions about my version of Bonding and wanted to know what it all meant. I thought I might oblige by thinking out loud, so to speak, and giving you some storyverse missing scenes. This story is set during the First Bond.

_Bonding is obsolete because mankind has reached its predestined end:  The ability to annihilate itself seed, root, and stalk.  What use a warrior Bond in a world so bent on self-destruction?_   —Yogi Hari Nam Singh Pura

  
Maybe it’s because there is blood in their First Bond. 

 

That’s Phil’s thinking as he sifts through the scant material SHIELD’s library offers on Bonding.  That even SHIELD doesn’t have much information suggests how arcane his inquiry is.

 

The last extensive intel is dated 1946.  The handful of Bonded couples that had pinged SHIELD’s radar over the ensuing years had earned only single-line notes in a chronology that marked the decline of the phenomenon.  

 

The last protocol SHIELD put in place regarding Bonding was in 1978.  The agents that had inspired the new protocol had been summarily dismissed with the thanks of a grateful but intolerant nation.  Bonded agents were a thing of the past, looked upon as unnecessary at best, liabilities at worst. 

 

Phil frowns and snaps closed the binder, waving away the cloud of dust the action causes.

 

As he sits there remembering the moment when Clint’s hand had closed over his wrist, he considers the way he’d been bleeding, the way Clint had also been scraped up, his hands skinned raw from catching himself at the edge of his rocking perch to vault himself through the air, defying gravity to get to Phil in time to catch him.

 

Phil catches himself running a callused finger over his wrist, right at the spot where Clint’s grip had first communicated that feeling of rightness, of joined will.  The touch had mingled their blood.  Phil’s touch now stutters, stops, presses into the tender hollow of his wrist.  He watches the blood pulsing in the blue vein there, feels it carrying something foreign through his body, something that binds him to another.

 

To Clint.

 

Frowning harder, Phil moves his fingers away, busies himself with standing and stacking the thin research binders, putting them on the cart for the archivist to return to the SHIELD secure stacks.

 

But when he’s done, he can still feel it, the connection, the completion of a circuit that sends a low, constant current through his consciousness.  It’s not so much sexual desire—though that’s there, too, of course—as a sense of something finally slotting into place.

 

That’s an unfortunate image for the others it raises, and Phil swallows his frustration and focuses on moving forward.  Progress is his usual solution to an impossible problem.

 

 _Mankind doesn’t need Bondmates now that we can fire drones from distant observation posts to destroy his enemies.  There’s no chance that anyone is going to sneak up on a joystick driver and lance him in the back.  The days of the warrior Bond are long over for mankind._   —Geneticist Joyce M. Orlin-Reedy, PhD, MD

 

Clint is in the bowels of SHIELD headquarters following his instincts.  He’s tracking an elusive mark, but he expects that he’ll catch up with his target.

 

What he doesn’t expect is Phil to step out from a recessed doorway and straight into Clint.

 

He also doesn’t expect the welcoming zing of electric energy to arc between them.

 

Phil takes an automatic step back but holds Clint’s gaze, not so much backing down as giving them each some space to decide what the next move might be.

They’ve never lied to each other, not by word or look, and it’s not in Clint now to pretend he isn’t feeling the steady thread of the Bond that links them together.

 

He imagines wrapping his fingers around that thread, tugging at it, letting it spool around his hand until he’s drawn Phil against him.

 

Clint lets the image go and meets Phil’s look with one of his own, trying to communicate what he’s willing to give up to let them be okay.

 

“Good, you’re here,” Phil says, as if he’d been expecting Clint to meet him in the hallway outside the Archives.

 

“Yeah,” Clint answers, proud that his voice doesn’t betray the rough edge of his nerves and the way proximity to Phil is lighting up the pathways of his blood.

 

“It seems that the First Bond may have been boosted by blood,” Phil offers, indicating by a tilt of his chin that they should walk together.  Clint gives him as much space as he can in the narrow, bunker-like corridor of the sublevel that houses the Archives.

 

“It may explain the…intensity…of the way we’re feeling.”

 

Phil, as always, does Clint the favor of telling it like it is.  Phil doesn’t sugarcoat the hard shit.  It’s one of the many things Clint appreciates about his handler.

 

“Does it explain why it happened to begin with?”  Clint saves the “sir.”  This isn’t that kind of conversation.

 

He can see Phil’s hesitant nod out of the corner of his eye, and it stops him.  Clint can count on one hand the number of times he’s seen Agent Coulson hesitate about anything—and he’d have a few fingers left over even then.  

 

“It’s because of the way I was feeling when I came for you,” Clint supplies, and Phil, who’s stopped a half-step in front of him, only turns part way to meet Clint’s head-on confession.  It’s almost as though Phil is afraid to confront what he’ll find on Clint’s face, but Clint knows he must be misreading the situation because Phil Coulson is a badass motherfucker, and he isn’t afraid of anything.

 

As if Clint has communicated his certainty—and maybe he has, maybe the Bond has already made it possible for that kind of wordless expression—Phil completes his turn so that he’s facing Clint and levels his gaze on Clint’s face.

 

Phil nods once, decisively, and though no words are exchanged, Clint can feel Phil’s meaning:  A soothing surety, a sense that what Clint felt at the moment he’d thought Phil might die was echoed in Phil’s regret as he’d hung on by slipping fingertips to a life absent of one thing he’d wanted but knew he couldn’t have.

 

Clint is showing Phil exactly what he feels.  It’s not a raw expression, it hasn’t been painted there by duress or blood loss or the terror of imminent death.

 

It’s an abiding look, steady and constant as the emotion that it reveals.

 

Phil returns an identical look, though a muscle in his jaw ticks with tension, and then he breathes out once, a long sigh through his nose.

 

He starts to say something, probably, “We can’t—,” but Clint stops him with a graceful gesture of his drawing hand.

 

“We’re good,” he says, willing Phil to answer him in kind.

 

Phil smiles then, a soft and genuine smile, the rarest of expressions and one Clint’s seen only once or twice before.  But he knows what it means, and it warms him there in the core where the Bond lives, a new center of gravity.

 

He’ll have to watch how he leaps from now on.

 

 _The idea of Bonding in this day and age is ridiculous, but the myth of it compels us, as is evident in every romcom out of Hollywood that features a hapless couple caught up in a Bonding and every storyline on primetime TV that involves two people brought together by magical misadventure.  Something in us, collectively, misses what we once had, even as we laugh at Bonding as old-fashioned and unnecessary and tell ourselves we’re better off without it._ —Hugh O’Larren, _Forever Bound:  Myth, Media, and Marriage in the Post-Modern World_

 

Around them, SHIELD resettles.  The whispers continue as they had before, tinged now with a new speculative zest.  The lunchroom buzzes, the hallways vibrate with a subtle change in tone.

 

In the administrative offices, forms are filled out and files are sealed and if Nick Fury breathes a little more fire than usual, Maria Hill ignores it in favor of figuring out how to put what’s happened in the best light for protocol and the other powers that be.

 

Somewhere in the Universe, the actual Powers smile.

 


End file.
